If you find change challenging, you are not alone and there are valid reasons for this

Change, even when we want it, can feel challenging to a nervous system whose job it is to keep us safe as the new, the unknown can represent a threat

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Change, even when we want it, can feel challenging to a nervous system whose job it is to keep us safe as the new, the unknown can represent a threat.

There may be a familiar ‘push pull’ feel to changing.

Which can feel frustrating and confusing, and generate perhaps further challenging feelings of failure, self blame and shame.

Leaning into a change process that feels safer, planned, paced, can offer a smoother journey into what we do want, whilst tempering and taming the fears, doubts and sense of regression that may present themselves along the way.

Too much change, too big a change, too fast an expansion can create contraction – the body, as life, seeks balance always; and there is a balance even in the wild pendulations between big expansions and big contractions.

So perhaps a gentler transition into change, without too much disturbance to the status quo (we still have to get up, go get life, show up, pay the bills etc) is a more compassionate, kinder way to negotiate and navigate change. A slower, more mindful dismantling of the old scaffolding. It was there all the while based on old versions of ourselves after all. And in this more conscious way, letting go of the old whilst embracing the new may offer a more integral, sustainable and overall integrative manner of expansion and growth as we move forwards in life.

I myself have been quiet for a while on social media and there’s a reason for that. I’ve been changing in the background as a human being, professionally. I’ve been taking my time with it. But it really has been challenging in some respects.

As I push towards change and implement changes in my life, there can be a pull backwards into the familiar.

For me moving forwards, moving into different practices, ways of living, choices that I’ve made for myself, I have been pulled back into old habits that I’m trying to let go of, such as the doomscrolling, such as coffee, such as chocolate, to make me feel better, to make part of me feel better.

My brain wants familiar whilst I forge ahead with the unfamiliar and that’s okay, although during that process, it can feel really, really challenging -  not only to go back to old habits and trying to let go of, but equally what comes in is my inner critic, naming me, shaming me, blaming me. And that feels hard to carry as well. And in that process of course I feel very vulnerable, so I back off, and that’s also an old strategy of mine, to shrink, even though I’m trying to expand.

So there’s a huge expansion going on and then a contraction and I think that’s how change takes place really.

Change is a painful process, it’s not plain sailing, it’s not a simple linear trajectory into the future without regard for the past. We bring our pasts with us and so those old habits can die hard, and feel painful when they repeat themselves and we find ourselves repeating those.

I hope this might be helpful to some of you who watch my videos, that I’m human as well, and as I try to expand and move into a better version of myself I want to move into, I feel that familiar pull backwards and that can feel challenging.

So if you’re in that process as well of wanting to change of feeling that old familiar pull backwards, know it’s okay and I wish you well with it.